How Big Startups Scaled up To Several Countries with Micro Services Architecture

When the business or enterprise operations go from the local to global, monolithic architecture of existing applications hardly meet the needs and expectations. Migration to microservice architecture is a viable way to stay and grow in the fiercely competitive environment.

The invention of the Internet has made the world a global village, but it was only possible when someone had seated in front of the desktops or laptops like computing devices. Later on, the introduction of mobiles has made the fragmented world a global village in true meaning by granting mobility and other options for connectivity.

In early days of the digital era, only websites and web applications were serving as electronic shops and were offering limited features and functionality. Therefore, web applications were monolithic in nature means acting as a single unit.

Monolithic Application Architecture

Technically, the monolithic application becomes responsible for all activities or functionality such as handling user inputs like HTTP requests, implementing domain logic, authenticate users, managing databases, and other communication in between various modules accomplishing different tasks, but tightly join with each other.

Ensues of Rapid Progress

Therefore, managing a minor fault or modification involves the entire application and need to build/correct it and deploy the entire system again with each time. It was not much bothersome until the size of the code of application remains within a limit that an IT team of business can work together.

Once the business grows, a number of users also grows, extra services and functions attached to it, and database inflated tremendously. Moreover, in the UX era, expectations of users at performance, usability, and user experiences like fronts grow. It compels business or organization to integrate third-party services to meet all.

With the pace of time, SMBs to enterprises all have started prefer Omnichannel approaches to stay and grow in the market. Mobiles have added additional loads and demanded extra workouts in the monolithic system.

Thus, burdens over IT departments in managing monolithic applications has increased. Now, they forced to find a way out for the sake of a better option at software architecture level. Gradually, a ‘Micro Service Architecture’ concept evolved, and became popular as well as got adoption among the giants to mid-level applications.

Remember: SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is an altogether different thing and applying SOA in monolithic never make it microservice in the true sense.

Let’s see what microservice architecture is and help businesses to expand further from local to global level.

What Is Micro Service Architecture?

It is an assembly or suite of small services glued together/coupled loosely as a whole unit. In simple words, a huge monolithic application can be broken down into several small fragments to work as independent units with all required power and privileges.

There are some obvious advantages and disadvantages of Microservices for startups to big businesses aiming to scale up to world-level operations.

Pros of Microservice Pattern

The main advantages of microservice pattern are:

– Saves You from Touching Core Codebase

Since, Micro service application is a cluster of several independent applications, tweaking the code of one small unit application never affects the operations of the rests of units.

– Deals with Small Codebase

Each microservice unit deals with only a single concern it has a little codebase and a few components to plumb like a database. Therefore, developers have to deal with a small codebase in the case of debugging, crash, or modification.

– Quick Scaling of Application

Scaling a giant codebase is a tough and costly affair, but a small codebase is easy and fast. Therefore, scaling a microservice application is a non-intrusive and quick experience for a developer.

– Fast Deployment

The majority of microservices have limited dependencies, so deployment becomes easy.

Cons of Microservice Pattern

The main disadvantages of microservice pattern are:

Can Create Communication Gap between the Services

– Microservices are depending on each other and need to function in collaboration. It demands complete channel of communication. Therefore, it demands additional tools to accomplish internal exchanges.

– In due course, developers should introduce HTTP APIs because HTTP is a de facto data exchange gateway on the web and anything related to it. Another mode of communication for microservices is relying on messaging queues.

– In the case of mass processing or long-running processes, placing the service request in the queue is an excellent way. In due course, RabbitMQ and ZeroMQ are extremely useful tools/services.

The issue in Service Discovery

– Microservices rely on each other in many instances and need to communicate with each other through APIs or other means, but identifying the required service is an essential step and should take place before communication starts.

– It needs highly available, consistent, and distributed design of application architecture from the app development team.

Designing Microservices

If you follow some good coding practices and design guidelines for microservices, you can achieve expected results easily. Those special designing concerns are:

– Follow the SRP (Single Responsibility Principle) while designing microservice application by implementing limited and focused business scope for a single unit.

– Go for domain-driven-design with bounded contexts where you have to find boundaries and align those with business capabilities.

– Never misunderstood that microservice means smaller service, instead perceive it as focused on smaller/limited targets for each service unit.

– A microservice should have a few operations, functionality, and simple message format

– The best practice is, to begin with relatively wide scopes at the beginning and to refactor to small units in later stages.

Message Management in Microservice

Microservices demand simple and lightweight messaging solutions to establish seamless communication in between the various components of the service architecture. Therefore, following are best ways, practices, and technologies to implement in designing microservices.

– Define service contracts using REST API using IDL(Interface Definition Languages) like Swagger and RAML on top of REST API whereas for non-REST/HTTP-based microservices we can use Thrift IDL.

Inter-service Communication

Microservices architecture built as a suite of independent services and process or inter-service communication is vital. Therefore, unlike SOA in the monolithic application, microservices uses several different communication patterns, such as: